This is the first of two articles about the transformation of the Western Left that has occurred over the past few decades. It describes the strange mutation it has undergone with the embrace of identity politics and the repudiation, in some cases inversion, of key tenets that used to be central features of the left-wing worldview.

This will be followed up in the second article that will consider what brought about these changes and the relationship between identarian leftism and Marxism. It will argue that the identarian "Left" has repudiated what was most valuable about the old Left, while importing and accentuating some of its most damaging pathologies. 

It will make the case for a post-identarian Leftism that is committed to the defence of liberal civilization as it faces its most severe challenge for decades  while keeping alive the aspiration for a more equal society.

Consider this thought experiment. Go back to the early 1970s, which is when I first got involved in politics as an activist on the left-wing of the Australian Labor Party. Suppose someone died and was frozen in a cryogenic chamber, to be awakened at a future time.

Let's give him a name. I propose Rip Van Winkle, the character in a story about a Dutch-American villager in colonial era America who gets drunk and falls asleep for decades, only to wake up to a world transformed by the American revolution.

Suppose that person was active in politics, an adherent of some variant of left-wing politics, and thought he had a pretty good sense of the lines of political and ideological division at that time.

What would such a person make of the ideological landscape if he woke up half a century later in our era? What, in particular, would he make of what nowadays counts as being "left-wing", or "progressive"?

I suspect he would think he had emerged in some Bizarro World, where everything was upside-down, or back-to-front, in which positions that in his earlier time were seen as constitutive of a left-wing worldview were now seen as right-wing, or even "far-right"; and viewpoints formerly seen as downright reactionary had somehow become "left-wing".

The thing that would trigger our reawakened leftist's greatest cognitive dissonance would be the change in the stance of the modern "Left" on matters of race and racism. In the early 1970s the left-wing position on race was pretty straightforward and was well on the way to becoming the consensus across ideological lines.

There were considerable grounds for optimism that the institutional and legal props of racism had been largely removed. In America the legal exclusion of black people of the Jim Crow era had been demolished by the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965). In Australia the Commonwealth Electoral Act (1962) gave all aboriginal Australians the right to vote in federal elections.

Race, on this earlier and more enlightened view, was seen as something we should aspire to transcend, well expressed in Martin Luther King's 1963 great civil rights speech when he looked forward to the day when his children would be judged by the "content of their character, not the colour of their skin".

Race was seen as referring to biologically heritable surface features, that should have no bearing whatsoever on judgements about a person's moral worth. On this view, a racist was someone disposed to think ill of or to discriminate against people because of their race, so defined. Old racist tropes, like the view of some religious reactionaries in the American South or apartheid-era South Africa, that black skin was the Mark of Cain, were anathematized.

So, let's say our hypothetical time traveller awakes in Australia, and decides to get up to speed on the current state of progressive thinking. What better source than the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the national public broadcaster supposedly bound by its charter to reasonably reflect the spread of opinion in the Australian community.

Maybe Rip would come across a podcast of a program with the disconcerting title Wrong to be White, which was a panel discussion featuring two academics specializing on race issues, Associate Professor Alana Lentin of Western Sydney University, regarded as one of Australia's leading academic experts on Critical Race Theory (CRT), and Joanna Cruickshank, a historian from Deakin University.

It was moderated by a Scott Stephens, who at the time ran the ABC's Religion and Ethics website, who introduced Alana Lentin as "probably a genius in the field" of CRT. On Lentin's own website, she mentioned she had been invited on the program to talk about the irredeemable nature of whiteness.

The entire program was one long exercise in the pathologization of "whiteness" (there is a sub-field of CRT known as "whiteness studies"). This reached its apogee when the moderator summed up the discussion in these terms, to the murmured assent of the other two participants:

The great moral debility about being white is that people have wilfully chosen the trinkets and accoutrements of the accretions of power and privilege over a much more fundamental bondedness with other human beings … I mean that is, if we were speaking in a theological register, we would call that a tremendous or even radical sin.

So, the very fact of "being white" is likened to a "tremendous or even radical sin"—and this from people who imagine themselves as progressive. What a strange thing for "progressives" to be saying! Instead of abjuring race-based judgements, these people seem to envisage a new moral hierarchy with "whiteness" the new Mark of Cain!

It would be bad enough if this sort of talk were confined to its originating sources in academia, but it has metastasized from its origins in the universities to all levels of society: politics, media and entertainment, the public and NGO sectors—even the corporate sector, where the vector is typically HR departments and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies that almost all major companies feel obliged to have these days, their personnel drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of graduates in humanities and social science departments now overwhelmingly dominated by the "Left".

Not to mention the schools. Late in 2021 the ABC screened a three-part documentary titled The school that tried to end racism, which foisted a view of race clearly drawn from CRT on 10-11 year-olds at a primary school in south-west Sydney.

Instead of encouraging the children to see through racial distinctions, the program required them to focus intensely on their racial status, with each asked to reflect in exquisite detail on their racial origins which, not surprisingly, were often quite mixed.

There was a particular emphasis on a binary division between those deemed "white" and those "of colour", with the former called on to reflect on their privileged status, the latter to think of themselves as oppressed.

It included an exercise where the children were lined up and asked to take a step forward or backward after answering questions like "do you have blue or green eyes" told to step forward, with those ending up at the back hobbled in the race of life. The class was separated into "affinity groups" based on race, with the whites expected to reflect on their unearned privilege, causing obvious discomfort to some.

The whole thing is repugnant, the precise inversion of Martin Luther King's philosophy, and reflects an obsession by "progressives" with increasing rather than reducing the salience of racial distinctions, and the perpetuation rather than resolution of racial grievances.

This kind of material permeates the Western world. The ABC program is a direct copy of a British program of the same name, which in turn was inspired by an American "anti-racism" exercise that separated people on the basis of blue or brown eyes.

The CRT brigade like to think of themselves as "anti-racist". In fact, they are the purveyors of an explicitly racist ideology thinly disguised as scholarship that has effectively licensed racist vilification in much less elevated terms, especially on social media.

How ironical that in our time the only significant ideological force in the Western democracies that deems it acceptable to deprecate a class of people because of their skin colour is the "Left". Even extreme manifestations of this mentality, such as the American academic who called for white genocide or talk about the necessity to start killing white people, are defended by the wider academic community. The "white genocide" tweeter was supported by 9,000 colleagues in a Change.org petition.

As for the members of "oppressed" identities, they are expected to stick to the identarian scripts crafted for them by the ideologues. The American Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley spelled this out when she said "we don't want any more brown voices that don't want to be a brown voice; or black faces that don't want to be a black voice".

In other words, they are expected to act as representatives or avatars of their identity group(s), and to remain accepting of and apologetic for, and certainly refrain from criticizing, "their" respective cultures.

The Australian indigenous activist Jacinta Price and her colleagues found this out the hard way when they dared to suggest that violence in aboriginal communities could be related to traditional culture; as did the young American ex-Muslim Sarah Haider, who founded the Ex-Muslims of North America, a support group for those choosing to leave Islam.

In a speech to the American Humanist Association she described being taken aback by the virulent hostility she received from her erstwhile colleagues on the Left, being described as a "House Arab", "Uncle Tom", and a particularly sinister epithet that has started cropping up in academic discourse: Native Informant.

This mentality amounts to a denial of agency: You, oppressed person, are not entitled to form your own views about the culture into which you were born; you must accept that you are essentially defined by your identity, which you are expected to celebrate. Break this rule, and you become an identity traitor, to be anathematized!

It seems, according to the "progressive" worldview, the ability to critique—indeed to rubbish your own culture is a strictly whites-only privilege.

All this is the almost complete inversion of how the Left used to see matters of race, individual agency, human universality, and free expression (with the exception of the communist and pro-communist element).

It amounts to a ditching of the Enlightenment legacy that used to underpin the left-wing world view. Indeed, the Enlightenment itself is widely deprecated in modern academia as just another toxic aspect of "white civilization", identified with the legacies of slavery, colonialism, racism and exploitation.

The problem with this perspective is that it overlooks the key virtue of the Enlightenment legacy—its self-reflective quality. The American sociologist and leftist political writer Todd Gitlin defends the Enlightenment this way:

For this reason, the Enlightenment is, to paraphrase German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, an "uncompleted project." Crucially, it is self-correcting. The abominations that litter the history of modernity do not refute the value of the Enlightenment. To the contrary. They go to show that Enlightenment has to be fought for by those who believe in it, even when, as in much of the 18th century, it does not win popularity contests, and even when its practitioners commit gaffes.

However postmodern academia will have none of this. Instead, the intellectual "left" has become infatuated with counter-Enlightenment figures like Friedrich Nietzsche, who advocated "new forms of slavery", celebrated cruelty and deprecated compassion; or Martin Heidegger, an enthusiastic Nazi who actively participated in the purging of Jewish intellectuals during the Third Reich.

The historian Richard Wolin has written a comprehensive intellectual genealogy of the postmodern repudiation of the Enlightenment (The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism). He makes the following observation:

Surely, one of the more curious aspects of the contemporary period is that the heritage of Enlightenment finds itself under attack not only from the usual suspects on the political right but also from proponents of the academic left. As one astute commentator has recently noted, today ‘Enlightenment bashing has developed into something of an intellectual blood-sport, uniting elements of both the left and the right in a common cause.

Thus, one of the peculiarities of our times is that Counter-Enlightenment arguments once the exclusive prerogative of the political right have attained a new lease on life among representatives of the cultural left. As a prominent advocate of postmodern political theory contends, one need only outfit the Counter- Enlightenment standpoint with a new ‘articulation’ (a claim couched in deliberate vagueness) to make it serviceable for the ends of the postmodern left.

You sometimes hear critics of all this refer to the "regressive left". In light of the above I think this understates the point: "reactionary left" would be more accurate. Rather than get into that, I prefer to address the nomenclature issue by always wrapping "Left" in scare quotes when referring to the identarians, a device pinched from postmodern academia which uses it on terms like "truth", "objectivity", "rationality", all of which, they say, are instances of "white man" thinking.

So far I have not touched on the other identities that the Critical Theorists see as divisible into an oppressor/oppressed binary. This seems to be a movable feast, with the focus moving from one to the next, the current new identity on the block being gender identity. This provides a striking example of what someone (I cannot recall who) has termed a "radicalization spiral", in which a proposition that at one point in time seems like a piece of fringe lunacy rapidly becomes an orthodoxy. 

In the case of gender identity, there has been an evolution from seeing gender—what people feel they are, or would prefer to "perform" as—as something distinct from biological sex, to a denial of the distinction. This has had the effect of putting women's sports on a pathway to destruction, in the process exposing biological woman competitors in physical danger in some cases.

In this phase of the radicalization cycle, the cultural revolution starts to eat its own, as with the treatment of J.K. Rowling, the formerly impeccably politically correct author of the Harry Potter books, recently not invited to the twentieth anniversary of the first filmed version. Now she is a gender denialist, who must be spurned, and if she were less wealthy and powerful, destroyed.

We see a similar radicalization spiral in "woke" epistemology, that views talk of objective truths as, you guessed it, white thinking. It is all about the different narratives, stories, "truths", as seen from the viewpoint of different identities.

In an article I posted on this site about Critical Race Theory in Australia, I describe how the aforementioned Alana Lentin, Australia's leading "theorist" of CRT, determined that a cartoon that appeared in the Melbourne Herald-Sun of Serena Williams throwing a temper tantrum at the 2018 US Open tennis tournament was racist, and furthermore that the matter was not even debatable.

Why not? Well, according to Lentin, numerous women of colour around the world determined that it was racist, and that was that. No defence of the proposition, no laying out criteria, just the opinions of some of those in the "oppressed" category. Not even any evidence that this was the view of a majority of black women, with any who deny the proposition not counted since, in Ayanna Pressley's terms, they are not speaking as black voices.

And it gets worse, in some cases outstripping satire. How about the 2 plus 2 can equal 5 controversy, where the American mathematician and critic of Critical Theory James Lindsay posted a spoof tweet that said:

2 + 2 = 4: A perspective in white, Western mathematics that marginalizes other possible values.

Lindsay did this as part joke, part experiment, following the introduction into school maths courses in Washington state and California of something called "ethnomathematics".

To his amazement, the wokeists took the bait, and a furious debate ensued, with even some genuine mathematicians trying to devise some sense in which 2 + 2 could equal 5!

In case you think this is just marginal nuttery, the Smithsonian Institute of African-American history had an exhibit that designated traits like accuracy, rationality, a belief in hard work, as manifestations of "whiteness". Guess who would wholeheartedly agree? The genuine white supremacists.

Some on the right have taken to labelling the phenomenon I have been describing as "Cultural Marxism". I used to think this was an oxymoron. After all, a key tenet of classical Marxism is that the economic "base", the productive forces and relations of a society, determine the "superstructure", the culture, morals, norms and institutions. On its face, identity leftism with its emphasis on the primacy of culture stands this on its head.

Furthermore, to label this lunacy as a variant of Marxism actually does a disservice to the latter—and I am no fan of Marxism, to put it mildly. After all, Marx conceived of his theory as a genuinely scientific analysis that revealed the laws, analogous to physical laws, determining the path of social development. Having known quite a few old-style Marxists, including some members of my own family, I can say they would not have had any truck with this identarian nonsense. They would have condemned it as "idealism", the idea that thoughts determine material reality.

One old Marxist who spoke up was the late British historian Eric Hobsbawm. In 1996 he gave a speech titled Identity Politics and the Left in which he asserts the fundamental incompatibility of identity politics with his understanding of the left:

So what does identity politics have to do with the Left? Let me state firmly what should not need restating. The political project of the Left is universalist: it is for all human beings. However we interpret the words, it isn’t liberty for shareholders or blacks, but for everybody. It isn’t equality for all members of the Garrick Club or the handicapped, but for everybody. It is not fraternity only for old Etonians or gays, but for everybody. And identity politics is essentially not for everybody but for the members of a specific group only.

Even today, we find the occasional group loyal to classical Marxism sticking up for the old-time political religion. How about this, on the World Socialist Web Site run by a one of the innumerable Trotskyist micro-parties. It has one of the most scathing denunciations of the 1619 project, an initiative of the New York Times and the well-known race-monger Nikole Hannah-Jones, that redefines the founding date of the United States as the date of the first introduction of slaves into British North America, rather than the Declaration of Independence:

The methodology that underlies the 1619 Project is idealist (i.e., it derives social being from thought, rather than the other way around) and, in the most fundamental sense of the word, irrationalist. All of history is to be explained from the existence of a supra-historical emotional impulse. Slavery is viewed and analyzed not as a specific economically rooted form of the exploitation of labor, but, rather, as the manifestation of white racism. But where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American “white people.” Thus, it must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions.

Hannah-Jones’s reference to DNA is part of a growing tendency to derive racial antagonisms from innate biological processes. Democratic Party politician Stacey Abrams, in an essay published recently in Foreign Affairs, claims that whites and African Americans are separated by an “intrinsic difference.”

This irrational and scientifically absurd claim serves to legitimize the reactionary view—entirely compatible with the political perspective of fascism—that blacks and whites are hostile and incompatible species.

I never thought I would say this, but hooray for the Trots (well, on this specific matter anyway).